Fifty years on the road
Some of the most eye-catching examples of Volkswagen’s creativity in producing the Golf for 50 years have involved leather.
According to its manufacturer, Volkswagen, the Golf is “Europe’s most successful car of all time”. This year, the model is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary. It has made its mark as a compact family car but also in motorsports, perhaps most notably in the mid-1980s, with Swedish rally driver Kenneth Eriksson behind the wheel of a second-generation Golf GTI. It has gone through eight generations now and is still in production today.
The claim about the Golf being Europe’s most successful car comes from the figures; more than 37 million of them came off Volkswagen production lines between 1974 and July 2024. This means the company has delivered around 2,000 of these vehicles every day since launch. In terms of numbers, it overtook the its famous Beetle in 2002.
New generation
The 2024 version of the Golf launched in July and is available in five-door hatch or five-door estate body styles, with engine options that include petrol, diesel, hybrid and plug-in variants. When it comes to the interiors of these cars, much of the discussion in 2024 is about the ‘infotainment’ system, the artificial intelligence-enabled voice assistant program and the smart parking technology.
Materials still matter too, though, and leather still features in the newest Golf, albeit often limited to the steering-wheel and the gearshift. Across the 50-year history of the model, however, there are have been plenty of leather highlights.
Spice Girls
This is particularly true of the sporty side of the Golf family and there were many eye-catching uses of leather on display at a special exhibition that Volkswagen set up at its production site in Osnabru¨ck to celebrate the anniversary. On show was a selection of sporty models of the car that have appeared in the course of the last 50 years.
In 1996, Volkswagen was celebrating another anniversary, 20 years of the Golf GTI. To mark the occasion, the company produced a special-edition of the car with features that it tied in with girl group The Spice Girls, whose first chart successes also occurred in 1996. These customisations included picking out the GTI letters in red and decorative red stitching in many parts of the interior. The Spice Girls were fond of leather; each chose a different leather outfit at a famous performance at the Europe MTV Music Awards in Stockholm in 2000. In the car at the Osnabrück exhibition, there was a golf-ball-shaped gearshift knob split horizontally, with the upper half finished in black leather and the lower half in aluminium. The dimpled golf-ball gear-stick knob has appeared a number of times in the car’s 50-year history.
A Golf V6 Turbo from 2009 at the exhibition features a full leather interior; other entries include only partial leather seats. A Golf GTI released for the model’s thirtieth anniversary in 2006 did this to particularly good effect, stitching the outline of one famous race-track, Interlagos in São Paulo, into the fabric that accompanied the leather.
Apprenticeship accomplishments
At the time of the model’s fortieth anniversary, in 2014, apprentices at the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg created their own commemorative Golf. This car also featured at the exhibition. With the exuberance of youth, the apprentices included a PlayStation with a dedicated screen in the rear of the vehicle, but Volkswagen said they had hand-crafted the interior “with artisanal precision”. This included racing seats and a rear bench upholstered in black leather.
Further demonstrations of the apprentices’ talent, creativity and enthusiasm for leather were on display in Osnabru¨ck. For more than 40 years, fans of the car gathered at a meeting in Austria of GTI enthusiasts, the Wo¨rthersee GTI Meeting (following the restrictions of the covid years, Volkswagen moved it to Wolfsburg in 2023). Special-edition cars created by the apprentices were often among the highlights.
One example was a car called the Golf GTI Dark Shine, unveiled at the 2015 Wo¨rthersee GTI Meeting. Named after a Japanise manga superhero, this car featured dark Daytona Grey paint at the front, transitioning to a Yellow Pearl Effect colour towards the rear. The team used leather, alongside microfibre material, to continue this theme in the interior.
Visual marvel
The following year, the apprentices won the admiration of the passionate Wörthersee crowd with the Golf GTI Heartbeat. In this car, the cabin was dominated visually by bucket seats from the Golf GTI Clubsport S. The leather seat centres featured red-backed perforations in the GTI honeycomb pattern.
Covid cancellations meant Wörthersee attendees did not get to see the Golf GTE Skylight, which the apprentices had prepared for the 2020 event. Here, blue dominated the interior. The central applications were in light blue, while the leather seats were in dark blue. Eye-catching features included the light blue illuminated piping on the front seats.
Their 2022 ‘unique study’, the Golf GTE Meteora concept car, suffered the same Wörthersee fate. Volkswagen called the interior, with Recaro Podium carbon bucket seats with leather and microfibre upholstery, “a visual marvel”, blending elements of a racing car and a spaceship. The inclusion of these designs in the special Osnabrück exhibition gave fans a chance to make up for lost time and to celebrate this special anniversary of the car’s launch.
Red-backed perforations in the seats of the Golf GTI Heartbeat.
All credits: Volkswagen AG
